Doctoral thesis

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Abstract

Climate change is undeniable. Greenhouse gases emissions such as CO2, CH4, and others, have caused that the global temperature starts to increase, and thus originating several changes in the world atmosphere. On the other hand, the energy requirements for humankind, are increasing day by day and renewable energies, unfortunately, cannot fulfill the energy demands. In this sense, we still rely on fossil fuels. To mitigate this effect on the temperature, it is important to find solutions that help us to avoid emitting large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, not only produced in power generation by burning fossil fuels but also to control the emissions from other important sectors, such as cement, steel and chemical industries. Membranes may in the future be used for this purpose. Our goal in “Novel hybrid membranes for post-combustion CO2 capture” is to develop innovative hybrid (polymer + nanosized particles) membranes and gain knowledge of the effect, affinity, and compatibility of the nanosized particles with the polymer, enabling improvements in the membrane fabrication and the resulting separation properties. These nanosized particles involve a specific functional group which will increase the CO2 separation efficiency of the membrane. Since we can modify this functionality we can make that the nanoparticle transport CO2 easier, then improve the performance of the membrane. So far, we have found that the nanoparticles have an important interaction with the polymer, increasing the crystallinity. Moreover, sometimes they produce microphase separation. Both have a negative effect and avoid the goal to reach the expected CO2 transport efficiency. In summary, although it was not possible to develop the innovative hybrid membranes with the targeted separation values, a lot of knowledge about of the effect, affinity, and compatibility of the nanosized functionalized particles with the polymer has been derived from these studies. This will hopefully help to develop better hybrid membranes for post-combustion CO2 capture in future.